Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-97)
Live Ammo (Ha! Ha! Ha!), 1962
Oil on canvas, 68 x 68 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

In 1960 Roy Lichtenstein, at that time an Abstract Expressionist painter, was hired to teach design classes at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. There he met Allan Kaprow, who was involved in the emerging art forms Happenings and Environments. Lichtenstein credited Kaprow for his realization that "art doesn't need to look like art." In 1961 he chose comic strips as his new subject matter, adapting their flat colors, strong graphics, and dot screens to monumental paintings. He quickly took his place among the most prominent Pop artists and retained his instantly recognizable style for the rest of his life.

Lichtenstein's initial works of this type were included in the first museum exhibition devoted to Pop art, "New Painting of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. The same year, he held his first one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. With a group of artists that eventually included Cy Twombly, Frank Stella , Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg, Castelli helped create the celebrity artists of the 1960s and held a practical monopoly on the growing market for Pop.

In the spring of 1963 the Guggenheim Museum in New York held an exhibition showcasing six young painters who would come to dominate the post-Abstract Expressionist art world. Six Painters and the Object included Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Jim Dine. Lichtenstein showed seven paintings, including three from his multi-panel sequence Live Ammo.

Lichtenstein later described the work as two diptychs linked by a single painting in the center. According to the artist, the combat narrative was "sort of mysterious . . . as though you had walked into the middle of a soap opera. Although you couldn't really figure out what was going on, the story had a cohesiveness." The phrase "Live Ammo" opened the sequence, blazoned across the first panel Sunday-comics style. A helmeted soldier, under attack, planned his strategy in the second. A tremendous explosion filled the third panel, BLANG!, and the fourth was a close-up portrait of the soldier as he ducked from the sound of bullets. The final panel, the Chrysler's Ha! Ha! Ha!, is a disorienting view of a banking fighter plane with red-and-white striped rudder and blue-shadowed belly.

In a 1963 interview Lichtenstein made the revolutionary intent of his paintings clear; his work, he said, was "anti-experimental, and anti-contemplative, anti-nuance, anti-getting-away-from-the-tyranny-of-the-rectangle, anti-movement-and-light, anti-mystery, anti-paint-quality, anti-Zen, and anti all of those brilliant ideas of preceding movements which everyone understands so thoroughly." He deliberately chose highly charged, emotional subject matter completely at odds with the impersonal, standardized techniques of cartooning and printing. "I think the meaning of my work is that it's industrial," he said. "It's what all the world will soon become."

Despite Lichtenstein's original conception of Live Ammo as a five-part sequence, he exhibited and sold the panels as independent works; they were last shown together at Castelli's gallery in 1963. Panels one, two, and four are in private collections; BLANG! is in the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo.


  • Contemporary Art >

©2008 Chrysler Museum of Art Copyright Info

245 West Olney Road, Norfolk, Virginia 23510 757.664.6200